Let's spend a moment on the good: I could tell what was happening during the fights. The kaiju (the big bad beasties) were immaculately designed, and they get a more interesting backstory than the usual a-turtle-got-a-bit-irradiated. We get straight into the story. It was shiny.
As for the rest... The only way the writing and the performances make sense is if you picture everyone as anime, wherein lines are often shouted, require little to no nuance, and can be somewhat incomprehensible. Pacific Rim is Evangelion spliced with Godzilla, just without character or depth. A good rule of thumb for a director might be: if not one of my human characters is as interesting or layered as Godzilla then I might have a problem. We meet ten different jaeger pilots (a 'jaeger' being the immense robots that punch the kaijus) and not one of them leave an impression. Throughout the film they have to have the most basic information spelled out to them, not because they need to know it but because we do, but this has the side effect of making them look rather dim. The writers don't trust the audience much more than they do the pilots. If we're told something important that's going to have a pay-off further down the line it usually gets paid off in the very next scene, lest we have to use our brains to recall information.
The spectacle in Pacific Rim really is spectacular, but what does it matter if you don't care? Guillermo Del Toro (who's previously created the amazing worlds in Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy) likes his world building, and has fun showing the uses the kaiju carcasses are put to, but he's spent more time and energy working out how much a kaiju gland will sell for on the black market than on whether he needs a character arc for... Anyone. Real Steel was silly, but it understood how to work a human and emotional element into a story about a robot hitting other robots. Del Toro, a man lauded as a visionary, achieves significantly less.
Overall: 5/10
SPOILERS!:
(highlight to read)
THE RADIATION
Elba's radiation sickness storyline is twaddle is many ways, but principally because his getting into a jaeger again shouldn't have any effect at all since the jaeger would need to be of the nuclear variety and have no safeguards (which Elba's suggested they now do) keeping the radiation in check. Why even bother introducing this when he's going to sacrifice himself anyway?
UM... SWORD?
Shouldn't they start by using the sword? Or, even better, the plasma canon? Or that chest blast-thing? If they're one time use weapons and need to be kept in reserve shouldn't we have maybe been told that? And, most importantly, should I really be worrying about these things in a film about big robots hitting big aliens?
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